25 November 2010

Call for Submissions: Edited Volume - German Women Writers and the Spatial (Re)Turn

Post date: 25 November 2010

Deadline: 1 December 2010

For our collection, we encourage interdisciplinary explorations of German women’s writing that combine ideas from cultural geography and texts that use the language and metaphors of space and place. Essays might include these concerns, or look to such issues as environmentalism, globalization, migration and immigration, concerns of belonging, points of encounter, spaces and places of (im-)mobility, topographies of departure and arrival, movement, motion, or shifting identities.

German Women Writers and the Spatial (Re)Turn (edited volume)

In the last few decades, the phrase “spatial turn” has received increased attention in German Studies, inspired by developments within the discipline of geography. Recent publications, such as Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel’s 2010 collection, Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, continue to highlight how theories of space expand our understanding of German culture. Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann’s 2008 volume, Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, may be the first interdisciplinary anthology on the spatial turn published in the German language.

This collection of essays, German Women Writers and the Spatial (Re)Turn, follows on the heels of these developments, recent as well as established, to bring recent feminist analysis of the spatial to German women’s writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. American feminist geographers, such as Patricia Price-Chalita, Alison Blunt, or Mona Domosh, have pointed out that concerns of empowerment and disempowerment in feminist writings often use spatial metaphors. Displacement, denial, or lack of space stands in contrast to the positive experience of appropriating and creating new spaces, or in reclaiming previously negatively-coded spaces. The same holds true for many native and non-native German women writers, who have oftentimes positioned their protagonists on the margins or in a liminal space. Both captured within and rejecting a Western European patriarchal and colonialist mindset, German women writers thematize borders, belonging, and place, but also traveling and mobility.

Please send a 300-500 word proposal (in English or German) to both editors, Carola Daffner (cdaffner@siu.edu) and Beth Muellner (bmuellner@wooster.edu) by December 1, 2010. Full essays will be due May 01, 2011.